According to Pew, 33 percent of self-identified Democrats1 are whites without a four-year college degree. They represent a larger cohort in the Democratic Party than whites with a four-year degree (26 percent), nonwhites without a four-year degree (28 percent) and nonwhites with a four-year degree (12 percent). Yes, President Trump carried non-college-educated white voters easily in 2016; the exit polls suggest Hillary Clinton won only about 30 percent of these voters. But, because they’re such a huge portion of the U.S. electorate overall (44 percent, according to Pew) that’s enough to make non-college-educated whites a big share of the Democratic flock.
And while the percentage of Democrats who are unaffiliated with any religion is growing and that group now makes up a third of the party, the majority of Democrats consider themselves Christians. And it’s not just black and Hispanic Democrats who account for the party’s churchgoing contingent: White Democrats who belong to “mainline” denominations, such as certain types of Presbyterians and Lutherans (12 percent), white Catholics (10 percent) and white evangelicals (7 percent) together form a is sizable percentage of the party — almost as large as the unaffliliated bloc. [...]
I don’t mean to dismiss the obvious: The parties do conform at least in part to their stereotypes, and that’s clear in the Pew data, especially the trends over time. In this era, it’s pretty easy to tell if you are attending a Republican or Democratic event without talking to anyone there — the Democratic group is more likely to be full of nonwhites and young people; the Republican one is more likely to be older and whiter. But it’s still pretty hard to guess which party an individual you meet on the street belongs to — particularly if they are white. And whites, according to Pew, still account for about 69 percent of America’s registered voters.
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